Antlers drowns a good monster movie in dour metaphor
Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, and impeccable craft make this muddled creature feature worth watching
Film Reviews Antlers
There’s a pretty good monster movie lurking somewhere beneath the oppressively depressive skin of Scott Cooper’s Antlers. It peeks its head out here and there—just like the monster itself, a hoofed ancestral beast the film catches only in quick glimpses, in what you could call a variation on the classic Jaws tact of getting more from less. The trouble here is endemic to the present age of creature feature: Everyone involved wants the monster to be more than a monster. Once upon a time, there was subtext in these films. It has since been swallowed whole by fearsome oversized metaphors.
Antlers can’t even settle on a single metaphor. You almost have to feel bad for its deerlike main attraction, forced to shoulder the burden of multiple ills, like an all-purpose Smokey The Bear of humanity’s biggest boners. At first, the movie seems to be sticking to folkloric interpretation, the scroll of an epigraph whispering of Mother Nature’s nastier offspring. The camera glides over a body of water in scenic Oregon, landing on a line of billowing factories looming within the surrounding woods. When something snarling and unseen drops a pair of workers in this post-industrial corner of the Pacific Northwest, we have to wonder if the gnashing thing is attacking on behalf of the environment rather than its own bottomless appetite.
The movie has other ideas, enough to stock a social-issues film festival. Maybe the real monster is economic depression. Or maybe it’s the opioid crisis. Both cast a shadow over Cooper’s colorless small-town setting. They are related problems, of course—all part of the tapestry of America’s failures. They converge in the home of a young boy, Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T. Thomas), with dark circles under his eyes and dark events weighing on his heart. Behind a locked door, his father (Scott Haze) growls and wails, sickness in his blood. Lucas’ brother is with him, shifting the film’s theme again.
His teacher, Julia (Keri Russell), can see the evidence of Troubles At Home. She’s back in her hellishly depleted hometown after an eternity away, crashing with her lawman brother, Paul (Jesse Plemons), following the death of their father. Based on a short story by Nick Antosca, who co-wrote the screenplay with Cooper and Henry Chaisson, Antlers doles out the backstory of these estranged siblings in bits and pieces. Suffice to say, Julia knows all too well about the way children of abusive households instinctively protect the secret of their parents’ mistakes. And in Lucas, she sees both a mirror of her own traumatic history and a belated opportunity for redemption—a Clarice Starling quest to quiet the lambs screaming in her dreams.
Cooper, maker of stately Hollywood dramas with masculinity on the mind and offhand moments of disarming sensitivity, is the working definition of a jack of all trades. Here, he dabbles handsomely in horror—a genre he’s flirted with before, turning Johnny Depp into an almost vampiric gangster in Black Mass and Woody Harrelson into a frighteningly barbaric figure of human evil in Out Of The Furnace, which was set in a different smoggy, desperate stretch of dead-end America. Cooper’s approach this time is to drown just about every frame of his movie in despair. Antlers sustains a note of unyielding moroseness through its muted palette and melancholic strings. It’s rare to see a monster movie, or a big-studio movie, this relentlessly dour.
There’s little quibbling with the craft. Antlers has a strong sense of place: a good feel for the bone-deep melancholy of this woodsy, rainy outpost of meth country. Its images can be striking and memorable; there’s a great, late overhead shot, for example, of a car cutting a faint line of illumination through blackest night, ballasted on both sides of the road by an ocean of foreboding foliage. And the actors are almost touchingly committed to the emotional stakes of the material: Russell and Plemons, both very good, tackle the script’s overfamiliar kitchen-sink drama as though they were pioneers in uncharted territory, admirably oblivious to the dozens of hardscrabble indies that have walked this path of grim familial reckoning before.
No expense was spared, either, on the Ray Harryhausen side of the equation. Among the producers is Guillermo del Toro, and you can see his devilish influence whenever this monster movie is stooping to the lowly business of acting like one. The violence is surprisingly grisly for such a high-minded affair; Cooper does not skimp on the gore. And what we do see of the creature is pretty cool—the latest argument for putting guys in latex again instead of summoning toothy, headlining horrors from the digital gene pool.
Yet the film’s aspirations to prestige smother its immediacy, the thrills of the genre it’s supposedly occupying. Antlers fancies itself a message movie, but on that front it’s muddled at best. All the studiously researched Native American folklore—packaged in a single expository info dump, finely delivered by ace character actor Graham Greene—keeps bumping up against its underlying thoughts about addiction, poverty, and cycles of violence. The impression is of an awkward attempt to cram the square peg of an abuse story into the round hole of respectfully reproduced mythology. What does this monster represent anyway? It can’t be everything. And by the murky messaging of the climax, you have to wonder if maybe nothing would have been preferable.
40 Comments
I have trouble believing Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons are the same species, much less siblings.
Someone let him out of that car at the high school?
You mean his locker?
Nah, the recent (last year) bizarre time-warp flick where he may or may not have died in a snow-bound car in his old high school parking lot. The writer apparently didn’t know WTF he was trying to say.
Have you ever looked up Jesse Plemons’ wife?
No, but I just did. Plemons isn’t married. (But he is engaged… to Kirsten Dunst!)
Speaking of “can’t believe they’re the same species”….
I am baffled by the idea that this is a relevant response.Should he look like his “wife”?I understand that you’re talking generally about Plemons’ appearance, but dirtside is talking about Russell as his SISTER. He should, in theory, resemble his SISTER. That is a statement about odd casting.Who Plemons is able to date/fuck/marry isn’t a matter of shared genetic ancestry.(It’s also maybe worth mentioning that this is trafficking in some dumb conventional attractiveness nonsense.)
Are you drunk? I only ask because I am, and I’m having trouble parsing the argument.
dirtside (paraphrase): Plemons and Russell don’t look alike, to a startling degree. They should not be playing siblings.You (paraphrase): Plemons and his significant other Kirsten Dunst are not in the same subjective class of attractiveness.Your response is about attractiveness. dirtside is saying they don’t look alike.(I will concede that it’s possible dirtside’s comment *includes* an element of attractiveness. But it’s not *about* attractiveness. And yours is.)
I prefer not to think about that.
I think they are believable as siblings. She got away from their hometown and has been living a healthy life. Him, not so much.
You almost have to feel bad for its deerlike main attraction, forced to shoulder the burden of multiple ills, like an all-purpose Smokey The Bear of humanity’s biggest boners. phrasing? I almost never hear the boner used to mean mistake anymore, and when you put “biggest” in front of it well…
A series of monocles popped from my eyes upon reading that sentence.
Hey, posting scans of comics is Laserface’s job!
I thought it was large series of pictures of Kinja comments of whoever he’s responding to.
I’m just gonna laugh like Phil Ken Sebben and high-five all around!
SEO and the logic of the internet… eventually “Smokey the Bear” and “humanity’s biggest boner” are gonna be trending together and this review will get residual clicks.
AV Club needs editors.the classic Jaws tact of getting more from lessTactic or arguably tack, but not tact.
Yeah, that meaning does evoke Mickey Owen dropping that third strike. I would be hesitant, to say the least, to use “boner” that way today.I do like the idea of an all-purpose Smokey Bear, though. Instead of a shovel, he might be holding a whiteboard and offering a marker. It had better be a big whiteboard, though, as humans have amassed quite a list of boneheaded plays with regard to the environment…
I was going to skip this one, but now that I hear it’s got Smokey the Bear with a giant boner I’m intrigued. There’s an old French movie called the Beast that retells the little red riding hood story as a sexy adult affair with a werewolf that pops a boner, but Smokey’s more comedic, I’ll be interested to see that they do with his rock hard bear dong.
Just saw it. Review is spot on, it’s well done and worth watching. I agree with the muddled messaging and dour tone, but despite that, I was engaged until the ending, which is legitimately bad and a big let-down. The movie sets itself up in a lot of ways as a modern Goldilocks and the Three Bears story, but doesn’t have the chutzpah to carry through with it to the end. If it did, it could’ve been a very affecting ending about family versus well-intentioned interlopers, perhaps even about the self-centeredness of solving other people’s issues so we don’t have to address our own (which is briefly hinted at in the movie). Also the expositional scene with the Native American setting up the mythology of the beast is laughably bad, and the movie plays super fast and loose with the “rules”, which makes the very end that much sillier.
I’m kind of over ‘dour’ so as interested as I was after first seeing the trailer, I think this is a pass.
Yeah pretty much everyone in the movie is abused, pill-popping, alcoholic, methhead, or in the case of the kid a victim of the above, and the town itself is poor and devastated, and the movie reminds you of these facts constantly.
Sounds like Mare of Easttown, but with a monster. Which could be something different, at least.
I remember being a little surprised by all the praise for the Babadook. It’s a fine movie, but even when it came out there wasn’t a shortage of creepy, atmospheric movies with jump scares and overwhelming sound design. The most novel thing about it was the overtness of the central metaphor, which I guess was inevitably going to be mimicked by other movies.
I love The Babadook but I would agree that a hefty chunk of its appeal is the metaphor. That said, it sounds like Antlers is trying to play with a dozen metaphors. However anyone feels about the metaphor in Babadook, it’s pretty focused.
I think Babadook is a good example of a monster/metaphor film that works fairly well. There is a growing subgenre of films that, while very good in some respects, don’t quite work on the level of either (a) horror or (b) whatever issue their metaphor dramatizes. Examples are Relic, Hereditary, Midsommar and arguably Malignant. Contrast these with, say, Night of the Living Dead, which has some glaring metaphors but also works beautifully as a straightforward horror movie.
That’s because Essie Davis is a treasure and Americans don’t get to see her very enough.
Babadook is very much a movie I’m glad I saw, but never need to watch again (see also: Hereditary). I thought its best trick was starting your sympathies with the mother (anyone who has kids has absolutely felt that bone weariness firsthand), then gradually making you realize that she was mentally broken and making things worse.
I didn’t dislike the ending, but it definitely felt underwhelming compared to what came before. I wonder if the ending was changed.
To be fair, the short story is also incredibly depressing. And if the endings are the same, also depressing.
A tale as old as time
I’ve not seen it, but I read the short story and that really kept everything ambiguous until the end. For most of the story, you’re led to believe the kid is either deeply disturbed or being abused.
There’s not even a hint of anything supernatural until you get towards the end, so it’s kind of surprising they made the monster the centerpiece of the film’s ad campaign. Also, I don’t think the short story mentioned the word “wendigo” once.
It didn’t. Also wendigos aren’t in the Pacific Northwest. Wechuges are. They’re similar. But it’s bizarre to bring in an Indigenous person to talk about lore their tribe would not have believed in. Either switch the location to the East coast or change the creature to a wechuge. Or don’t do any of that, because the ambiguity of the original story was very effective. And the Indigenous elements added to this story kinda felt like tokenism.
I read the story after knowing it was the source material for what looked like a promising horror movie, so I guess I knew there was going to be something like that. However, I remember the story including stuff fairly early on (it’s not very long) that could only be explained by the supernatural, certainly once you get to the killings. The things in the story are definitely not Wendigos.
The kid kinda looks like a young Daniel Craig. I can see him in a little tuxedo.
Sadly the kind of horror movies I most enjoy/appreciate have resulted in a glut of lesser works. I quite like “arthouse” horror with some metaphor to it but that can be done badly, and it sounds like that’s the case here.I also love faux documentary/found footage horror. And that has seen a glut of bad, as well.